The American legal system, as well as some other legal systems around the world, relies heavily on a concept know as stare decisis. This Latin phrase means as “to stand by things decided.” The phrase “stare decisis” is itself an abbreviation of the Latin phrase “stare decisis et non quieter movere” which means “to stand by decisions and do not move that which is quiet.” The American legal system practices stare decisis by deciding similar cases in similar fashion and not overruling previously established law absent a good reason to do so.
Legal professionals, such as paralegals, judges and lawyers, constantly apply the principle of stare decisis by using legal content to support their arguments and positions. In general, there are two types of sources of legal content, primary sources and secondary sources. Primary sources are judicial opinions dealing with the same legal issue. Primary sources are said to be “binding” if the primary source is from a higher court (or the same exact court) than the court currently deciding the legal issue and the higher court is in the “chain of command” of the court currently deciding the issue. For example, the U.S. Supreme Court's opinions are binding on all other courts deciding the same issue. However, a federal district court's opinion from, e.g., New York, is not binding upon a federal district court in Pennsylvania deciding the same issue. The opinion of the New York court is considered persuasive (but not binding) primary authority. Secondary sources comprise other legal content such as law review and other scholarly articles briefs, motions, and administrative decisions.
Ideally, legal professionals would always be able to support their positions and arguments with primary authority that is binding. However, this is not always practical due to many reasons including, for example, new issues arising in the law which courts have yet to address. Further, parties may also have different interpretations of how or if a particular previous judicial opinion applies to their dispute. In fact, parties may not even agree upon what the legal issue that needs to be resolved.
In order to provide clients with fast and superior legal services, many legal professionals use computerized research to attempt to find primary authority that is binding. This helps control legal costs while making legal professionals choosing to use computerized research more efficient.
However, even with computerized research, legal professionals cannot be fully aware of all potential legal issues due to the vast amount of legal information legal professionals may have to review. For example, West Publishing Company of St. Paul, Minn. (doing business as Thomson West) (hereinafter “West”) offers the ability for legal professionals to conduct computerized research on over 100 million documents. West collects legal content from various sources and makes them available electronically through its Westlaw® information-retrieval system. (Westlaw® is a trademark of West). Searchable documents include documents from both primary and secondary sources. Further, the West Key Number™ System, which provides classified summaries of legal points, made in judicial opinions, is also searchable (West Key Number™ is a trademark of Thomson West). The summaries, known as Headnotes, are classified into more than 90,000 distinct legal categories, and can be used for a variety of purposes, such as evaluating the relevance of legal opinions to particular legal issues. Secondary resources, such as American Law Reports (ALR®), include about 4,000 in-depth scholarly articles, each teaching about a separate legal issue.
Multiple systems used by legal professionals, including Westlaw®, have addressed the ability of a legal professional performing a search to quickly become familiar with other potentially relevant legal issues. For example, Westlaw® currently provides legal professionals with a feature known as ResultsPlus®. This feature is described in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/028,476 filed Jan. 3, 2005, the contents of which are incorporated herein in entirety, entitled “Systems, Methods, Interfaces and Software for Extending Search Results Beyond Initial Query-Defined Boundaries.” Essentially, this feature provides the legal professional with a screen with links to: (1) a first set of documents responsive to their search query; and (2) a second set of documents including documents outside the boundaries of the original search query. The feature docs so in a manner that causes the first set of documents and the second set of documents to be displayed separately within a single graphical user interface (“GUI”).
There exists a need to further improve the searching of legal documents by legal professionals.